Reminded of a line about Cliff Burton

One of the bands that I discovered when I was at Camp Pendleton was a fun group called Metallica. This was back in the days of cassette players, and while the hand held ones were common, a lot of folks carried 'boom boxes' of various sizes. The main difference between the two was while the smaller ones had a speaker, unless you wanted your music to sound like a handful of marbles in a clothes dryer, you used headphones. The boom boxes were designed with better speakers.

So I was wandering around the squad bay one Sunday afternoon, on firewatch. This meant I was in uniform, I couldn't sit down and read, and if something awful happened, I was supposed to be the one who dealt with it. What it meant to me was that I was walking around an open room the size of a small airport lounge and bored out my skull. So of course, when I heard some guy's boom box vibrating with sound that made me think of a mob hit squad bludgeoning some poor fool to death with guitars and drums, I asked, “Hey, what is that?”

“Master of Puppets.”

The next time I went to the PX, I looked in the music section. There was a tape with cover art showing rows and rows of white crosses used as gravestones. The dead grass that grew among them was thick and neglected, and puppet strings connected the stones to hands that were way up in heaven. I forked over some of my hard-earned money, and listened to the whole tape that night. That's how I got hooked.

While I was, and remain, a fan I wasn't a devoted fan. I didn't join the fan club and I wasn't in a position to take leave whenever I wanted so I could go to a concert. This also took place in the days before the web, and so it was a while later before I found out that one of the guitar-bludgeoners, Cliff Burton, had died. When I got back from the nine-month deployment that was my share of Desert Storm, I was hanging around in a friend's room, and he had one of the popular music magazines sitting out. Inside was a tribute to Burton, and the writer had summed up his feelings in a simple phrase: Death sucks, and there's nothing you can do about it.

The other day Fear.net had an article about Richard Matheson dying. To me that doesn't just suck. It means the circle of people I would enjoy spending time with, sharing ideas with, and getting inspired by is now smaller. It means no more books, or stories period, by a man who could write tales that would stick in your head and pop back up just as you were trying to sleep. It means I can never shake hands with the man who scared the holy **** out of me.

My favorite horror movies and shows are a diverse bunch. The Legend of Hell House is up near the top of the list, and goodies like the old Twilight Zone episode where William Shatner scares everyone on the plane by trying to get them to look out the window will never get old. Stir of Echoes was just creepy, and Last Man on Earth scared and saddened me. I saw The Incredible Shrinking Man when I was a kid, and it really bugged me because it touched on real-life themes and problems that even today you don't see in horror movies. (and it still didn't do the book justice, as I later found out) Most of these were movies or episodes that I encountered when I was young, and it really never occurred to me to notice who wrote them. I can look back and say maybe I thought it would be like looking up a magician's sleeve. Once you know the trick, the magic is gone.

Once I did connect all the dots, the hunt was on. Every time I went browsing at Barnes and Noble or Borders, I made sure to check the M section of either the horror or general fiction. I went back to the video store and rented Trilogy of Terror and watched it with fresh eyes. When I heard that someone had once asked George Romero where he got the idea of people being trapped in a house and surrounded by the undead, and he (supposedly) said, 'I stole it from Richard Matheson,' I must have split my own face, grinning.

Well, the magic may not be gone, but the magician sure as hell is. There will be no more tricks from one of the greatest of conjurers, someone who not only made us shudder but made us think. Forgive me if I stand up one more time to applaud.

Then I'm going to get back to writing.

How to steal and be complimented on your theft

So today (Saturday) the internet is being a bit wonky. So I'm going to use this time to get this week's entry typed in a head of time. I'm clever like that.

A friend and I once got into a spirited discussion about fanfiction, which ended with an armistice rather than a real peace. We had started discussing Sherlock Holmes, and the story, 'The Seven Percent Solution' came up. This is a story not written by Doyle, but considered so good that it gets treated as cannon, meaning all the little details in it are considered just as true as those from the books that were written by him. That's when hostilities began.

There are a lot of created universes. Harry Potter, Holmes, Michael Moorcock's, Discworld, and yes, Twilight. They get a lot of fans reading them, and most people who read have enough imagination to take the stories and wonder what else could happen in this strange, exciting place. If the story really reaches out and grabs us, (and that's and individual response, so I'm not going to get into whether or not a universe has to be widely considered 'good' for this to apply) then it's fun to just daydream about what our life would be like if we lived there, too. This real world can sometimes suck, and a fantasy world only sucks in ways we can handle.

Is it wrong to imagine? Hell no. Everyone should do it. Imagine enough, and you might start to come up with a story of your own, something where the hero (gender neutral usage) finally takes care of that one twit in the story that you really hated. Since this is your version of the world, there's a place for you, too. You can be the hero's next door neighbor, his confidante, his backup, and you can be a hero too, when the main one is off doing something else. So far, so good.

Should you write all this down? Why not? It can be fun, and if you write other stuff, it can kick-start that part of your head if it ever gets sluggish. I've done this, and takes me in directions I might otherwise not go.

Then you decide to go out and make some money with this story. That's when I ask that you pause for a minute.

As I've said before, writing is work. You start with an idea, an image, a bit of dialogue, or something else that gets the brain juices flowing. Then you take that seed and plant it in the (hopefully) fertile soil of your perception of the world, either the real one, or the one you're thinking about. It takes root in your own concepts of how people talk, whether or not we landed on the moon, whether that shy guy at the back of the classroom is going to grow up to be the inventor of a faster than light drive or someone who collects other people's spleens, and whether or not something creeps out from under your bed while you're asleep. You start that seed growing, and you prune it when it goes in directions you don't want. Get your plant big enough, and you've got a story.

When someone writes fanfiction, they're starting with a big chunk of someone else's plant. Again, not a bad thing, but recognize where that part comes from. Assume there are no copyright issues. (BIG assumption. I know very little of that field, and I know enough to say that it can be really, really messy) This is a moral argument, not a legal one.

When you make a character, and you either put enough work into him or her to make a good one, and/or you get lucky and create something that pushes people's buttons in the way that they like them pressed, you've made something good. Holmes is the standard by which all other literary detectives are judged, and with all the movies and plays that have come out, we've seen multiple interpretations of the character. Then someone went and wrote, 'Sherlock Holmes versus Dracula.' I saw that title standing in line at the library when I was ten years old, and I've never been the same since.

So what do you do if you have an idea that was spawned in someone else's flowerbed? Grow it, of course. Let it grow as big and as beautiful as it can. Then step back and look at it, hard.

Is it good? More importantly, is it strong enough to survive on it's own? If not, keep it and enjoy it. If it is, take a cutting from the part that you made, transplant it, and see it it will grow. One of my major complaints about the 'I am Legend' movie, wasn't all the tweaking that they did with the setting, it the fact that both of the endings were completely contrary to the ones that Matheson wrote. If you're going to borrow that heavily from someone, do what George Romero is supposed to have done with Night Of The Living Dead. He got the idea, and the scares and suspense, of a lone house surrounded by undead from I am Legend, and built his own story around it. It's great to get seeds from other people's plants, just do your own growing. 

I've finally made a profile over at Fearnet. One of the bloggers that I follow, Drew Daywalt, had some trouble happen to him recently, and I tried to offer a bit of encouragement.

Still writing, although the fact that this isn't getting posted until Monday might seem to call that into question.